Is There Any Hope for France’s Left?

As the far-right surges, the contradictions on the left may prove to be irreconcilable.

December 23, 2016

“Will François Hollande be remembered as the Franklin
Roosevelt of Europe?” It was with this question that Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century and
one of France’s most vocal critics of austerity, began his reflection
on Hollande’s electoral victory in 2012. There was undoubtedly a touch of irony
in that question—“the comparison can make one chuckle”—but it was nonetheless
an honest assessment of the forces that were already impinging on the new
president and other major European leaders. In 1932, very little of what became
the New Deal was spelled out in Roosevelt’s campaign against Herbert Hoover.
All that Roosevelt knew was that, as Piketty writes, “the crisis of 1929 and
the policies of austerity had brought the United States to its knees and that
public power must reassert control over a finance capitalism on the run.” The
scale of the crisis pressed Roosevelt into a daring rush of experimentation.

Piketty’s hope was that the incoming president would likewise
be pressed into inventiveness and ingenuity. The crisis in Greece and the gulf
between heavily indebted Southern European countries and the dynamic North
would necessitate greater cooperation on fiscal policy and the mutualization of
sovereign debt. Hollande, as the president of the European Union’s second
pillar, would be uniquely situated to take the case for a popular redefinition
of the EU to Brussels and Berlin. The rise of euro-skepticism was simultaneously
a roadblock and a harbinger for dramatic change—it would create the needed
opening for a departure from the norm. The rise of populism in France and
across the continent would give momentum to an establishment candidate that had
pledged to seriously confront inequality—Hollande became famous for the campaign
promise, later aborted, to tax all annual incomes over one million euros at 75
percent.

The events of the last five years have proved that Piketty’s
latent cynicism was justified. On December 1, a melancholic Hollande delivered
an unannounced address to the nation. At what was the lowest point in his
popularity, Hollande announced somberly that he would not seek a second
presidential term. The bulk of the speech, however, was largely a defense of the
many controversial decisions he made after abandoning the populism of his
campaign and early mandate. Large tax credits and deductions for corporate investments
and the liberalization of the labor code were designed to improve the country’s
business climate and ameliorate the still stagnant employment market. “The results are here,” Hollande pleaded late in the
speech, “much later than I had anticipated, I admit, but they are here.” In a
climate of deep insecurity, Hollande bolstered the French security apparatus,
now over a year into a state of emergency. The one regret that the president admitted: proposing in the aftermath of the
November 2015 Paris attacks a constitutional reform that would have enabled the
nullification of citizenship for individuals convicted of terrorism.

The reform never passed. In fact, it added fuel to a growing
revolt within a Socialist Party rapidly losing confidence in its own president. Hollande’s decision to step aside was born out of a frank
assessment that his candidacy would do more to divide than unify a French left
that had become demoralized and balkanized during his tenure. He concluded his address by hoping that his renunciation would enable “a
collective spark that would encourage all progressives to unify.”

This plea has
been echoed in recent weeks by numerous calls for some form of grand primary of
progressives, which would take the place of the Socialist primary currently
scheduled for late January. Though Francois Fillon of Les Républicains
and Marine Le Pen of the National Front are the front-runners in recent polls,
the wide field of “progressives,” from centrist neoliberals to left-wing
populists, could, if unified around one candidate, form a commanding coalition.
The reality is that the growing chasm between these two poles will likely prevent
such an alliance from holding.

Donald Trump’s victory was greeted with shock and awe by the
political class across Europe. In France, it
could happen here was the conclusion drawn by many who had dismissed
the possibility that the right-wing National Front might arrive at the
presidential palace. This picture was then complicated by a new wrinkle on the
French right: the surprise victory of Fillon in the conservative primary in
late November, which had been previously understood as an internal battle between the
liberal wing of the French right, rallied around former Prime Minister Alain Juppé,
and the insurgent populism that has upended the United Kingdom and the United
States, embodied by combative former President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Fillon’s victory has revealed the existence of a third force.
The darling of the conservative, Catholic constituencies that hold a large sway among
the French right, he is known for his staunch opposition to the expansion of
gay rights. Although he has not pledged to repeal the 2013 law guaranteeing
marriage equality, he has vowed to halt any further liberalization, on adoption
and family rights, specifically. Among Fillon’s other controversial stances is
his endorsement of calls to alter the récit national, or the national
story or history, as it is taught in France’s educational system, imagined by
the entire political establishment to be the bedrock of French republicanism.

Presenting a greater break from the country’s norms is
Fillon’s social and economic radicalism. Imagining himself as something of a
French Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, Fillon hopes to take a sledge-hammer
to all that has remained to distinguish French capitalism from its
trans-Channel and trans-Atlantic counterparts. For Fillon, the stagnant economy
needs nothing short of unrelenting shock therapy. The “radical transformation
of the country” would entail massive reductions in taxes for the wealthiest
households and businesses, a drop in labor costs, and a drastic re-imagination
of the French state. Speaking before a gathering of executives and tycoons on
March 11, Fillon likened
his first 100 days to a “blitzkrieg.”

By July 1, 2017, he looked forward to receiving a pile of
reforms from the ministers of the economy, industry, and labor. These he
suggested would be passed “using all the means allowed under the constitution
of the Fifth Republic” including “the 49-3,” an increasingly used article of
the constitution that enables the passage of a law by ministers without a vote
of parliament. The Reagan Revolution by decree: One of his most infamous
planks is the intention to fire 500,000 public sector workers, in a country of
roughly 66 million people and an unemployment rate already hovering at 10
percent.

In other words, the social compromise that has characterized
French capitalism over recent decades must be irrevocably abandoned. Even for
Le Pen, Fillon represents an insufferable rupture from French norms. She has declared
that she is “thrilled” by the prospect of facing off against Fillon. Despite boasting
an equally frightening platform heavy on the xenophobic and nationalistic
sentiment, there is a
kernel of truth in Le Pen’s historical assessment of the Les Républicains candidate: “[Fillon]
offers an ultra-liberalism entirely against the current of everything happening
in Europe and in the world. François Fillon is like the candle salesman after
the invention of electricity.”

The struggle between neoliberalism and populism is even more
marked on the French left. Many have argued that the already wide field of
Socialist Party candidates should whittle itself down before the primary to two
representatives of these wings, so as to amplify the debate over the future of
the party. Manuel
Valls, Hollande’s prime minister, officially joined the race on December 5.
Valls has a difficult path ahead: Though he enjoys broad support among the more conservative wing
of the Socialist Party, having presided over much of Hollande’s shift from
populism since 2012, he has hoped to present himself as a unifying candidate.
This is ironic because Valls himself coined a now infamous phrase in French
political language: that there exist two, “irreconcilable lefts.”

The self-described modern left, which Valls hopes to
preserve and lead, is committed to participating in and harnessing the effects
of an inherently beneficent globalization. Embracing the trajectory of the
party’s development in recent decades, this wing insists on drifting away from
the social compromises developed over the past century. France’s legal codes
governing the ability of corporations to hire and fire workers, the argument goes,
were developed at a time of stable mass industry and are buckling under the
fluidity of today’s labor markets. Once occupying a dominant position in the
global economy, France has grown sclerotic and must compete with a wider field
of competitors. Valls argues that his faction is locked in a struggle with the
forces of nostalgia. Resistance to reform is defined as clinging to the
ideological struggles—capitalism versus socialism, essentially—that captivated
the French left throughout the 20th century.

Hollande’s presidency gave birth to growing dissent within his
own political family, where a clique has become increasingly dismayed by the
trajectory of the Socialist Party. In many respects, these dissenters, referred
to as the “frondeurs,” hope to restore the coalition and ideas that animated
Hollande’s campaign in 2012. That the two leaders of this wing, Benoit Hamon
and Arnaud Montebourg, were both former ministers of the sitting government
speaks to the disillusionment with a president who had campaigned to attack
income inequality and shifted to a politique
de l’offre (“corporate welfare”). The desire to transform, and thereby
preserve, the European Union likewise lives on among these dissenters. In a
recent interview,
Montebourg said that his plan is to “oppose the conservative bloc led by
Germany” and to “build a reform bloc among the member countries who had placed
hope in the election of François Hollande and who had been disappointed.”

This rebellion is more than a simple rejection of the policy
prescriptions pursued by the Valls-Hollande duo. It is also an attack on the
way government has enacted unpopular reforms. Episodes such as the passage of a
package of labor reform laws through extra-parliamentary means (the “49-3”)
have rightfully propagated fears about a reform-by-decree model. This reservation
can hardly be characterized as a case of ideological nostalgia, as the
reformers would have us believe. It is born out of a much deeper suspicion of
the centrist elements of the Socialist Party: Their efforts to reform the
country along more pro-business lines are perhaps only possible by curtailing
the institutions of liberal democracy itself.

The calls for a broad primary of the left are directed first
and foremost at the two insurgent movements that have sought to bypass the
Socialist Party entirely. What we are possibly witnessing is the Socialist
Party’s unseating as the center of gravity on the French left. There are now
three distinct poles—a neoliberal party, an unhappy alliance of
Socialists, and a growing progressive populism—that share roughly equally the
remaining support of the French electorate, once you account for the right.

Taking Valls’s neoliberalism to its logical conclusion—a
breakaway party entirely shorn of the ideological baggage of the Socialist
Party—is the independent candidacy of Emmanuel Macron. There is very little in
terms of substance that separates Macron from Valls—the conservative weekly newsmagazine
Le Point, in an issue devoted to the
two candidates, asked, “Is the left finally leaving the Stone Age?” What distinguishes
Macron from Valls is the former’s opportunism: Macron began to abandon the
Hollande ship this summer, debuted his movement En Marche!in July, resigned as economy minister in late August, and
officially announced his candidacy in November.

Fillon’s victory poses some problems for the Macron/Valls
project. In a campaign that had been presented as an effort to break the
left-right binary entirely and establish a “progressive” versus “populist”
battle, Macron now has to separate himself from a conservative candidate whose
project is a more extreme version of his. (Macron was one of the staunchest
advocates in the government for using article 49-3 to pass unpopular
labor-market reforms.)

Although his platform remains very opaque to this day, the
undeniably charismatic
Macron has nonetheless crafted some interesting arguments to make this
distinction. Macron’s target is not simply the old labor protections inherited
from the 20th century, but the nexus of big business and government. Macron’s
claim to rally French progressives is this crucial pairing. While Fillon may be
the candidate of oligarchy, Macron vies to speak for the anxieties and wishes
of the small entrepreneur weighed down both by an archaic labor code and tax
system and monopoly. In a year in which
populist revolts have shaken confidence in the economic doctrines of the past 30
years, he has innovated a brilliant strategy: re-package those old doctrines as
a new form of populism.

Diametrically opposed to Macron is the insurgent campaign
lead by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the populist party La France Insoumise (“Rebellious France”).
Like Macron, Mélenchon hopes to convince voters that the Socialist Party is an
impossible alliance. Speaking
in early December in Bordeaux, in a 100-minute address filled with historical
excurses on Montesquieu, Mélenchon declared that the right’s coronation of
Fillon was “a good thing” that can “clarify” the political crossroads at which
the country finds itself. Fillon is “the synthesis of what the right really is
in our country,” Mélenchon said, “the most absolute economic liberalism and the
most total moral and intellectual conservatism.”

With such a reading of the situation it is not hard to
understand Mélenchon’s refusal to cooperate with a Socialist Party led by the
likes of Hollande and Valls. Mélenchon has been waiting on the sidelines of French
politics for the past half-decade. What’s remarkable is that the candidate
enjoys support in the mid-teens according to recent polls, which show no
candidate exceeding 30 percent in the run-up to the election. All the more
remarkable is that this is a figure famous for such proposals as capping the
ratio of executive-worker pay at 20:1
and immediately calling a constitutional convention to usher in the Sixth Republic.

But Mélenchon is also in competition with Le Pen, whose
National Front has some of its strongest support (and a few elected offices) in
the old industrial heartlands of the country. This has undeniably pushed Mélenchon
into flirting with a nationalist
discourse himself. Mélenchon’s line comes into higher relief, however, with his
declared admiration for such Latin American figures as Hugo Chavez, whom he referred
to as “the infinite ideal of human hope, of revolution.” Relative to the
National Front candidate, Mélenchon’s euro-skepticism is likewise tempered, if
only slightly: Either the union is fundamentally re-imagined in the name of
economic security and social protection (and as a political and economic counterweight
to American imperialism), or France leaves.

These divisions go much deeper than the usual debates within political
families. What has emerged are two distinct strategies for confronting Le Pen’s
rise and, more significantly, two sharply different visions for the country and
Europe. That a grand primary of progressives could paper over these
cleavages would appear to be wishful thinking. What we will likely see instead is a rump
primary for a rump Socialist Party ravaged by the legacy of François Hollande,
the Franklin Roosevelt that wasn’t.